Teaching the Holocaust
Posted on March 26th, 2008 in Uncategorized
The Holocaust is one of those things I don’t remember learning about, but I’ve always known about. I read the Diary of Anne Frank in elementary school and in middle school the movie came out. It wasn’t until high school that I got all of the gruesome details. Sophomore year is when my stereotypical history teacher taught us from a tattered American history book. That’s when I learned the traumatic numbers came out. It may seem a little late but I actually understood what they meant. How can you fathom a death toll six million people when the population of Grand Rapids seems like the world?
The template used to teach others usually consists of WWII details, Night, Schindler’s List and if you’re lucky, a talk from a Holocaust survivor. But teaching nowadays has changed. Is that a good thing? Maus stirred up some conversation about if it should be used to teach. I think it could, maybe not in a history class as the first time discussing the topic, but in an English class, a lot like this one, where you are taught to read past the words on the page. Forget the fact that they’re mice and go more into relationships and symbolis. The meaning is still there.
A real controversy for teaching would be Nintendo’s new game. Nintendo has a Holocaust game in the works, Imagination is No Escape. There are a few news articles all saying the same thing: Nintendo of America doesn’t plan to distribute the game in North America, there is no on-screen violence and the game is causing a lot of controversy. Nintendo Passes on Holocaust Game. The game follows a Jewish boy through the Holocaust and from what I understand from these articles, he has to pretend he’s somewhere else in order to escape the cruelty of what’s going on. *DemoNews, a website that I had to have translated from German, said it was a mix of Schindler’s List and Alice in Wonderland.
It’s weird how technology changes and how we find ways to use it.
The effectiveness of this game will be interesting to find out about.
*if you use this translator, it will translate the whole page
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